L. Michelle Smith Encourages Women of Color to Achieve Their Corporate Dreams

THROUGHOUT HER SIX YEARS AT TCU, L. MICHELLE SMITH ’93 (MS ’95) threw herself into the Horned Frog experience as a cheerleader, member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, student newspaper columnist and organizer who successfully rallied the university to recognize the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday. Those formative achievements shape her ongoing work as an author of leadership books as well as her roles as a podcast host and an executive and personal coach.

Whether she’s writing, standing at the microphone addressing a large audience or recording a podcast with a guest, Smith radiates warmth, curiosity and the sort of professional savvy born of experience. She knows the pinnacle of success in the corporate world and also heartbreak in the professional arena and elsewhere. Empathy informs the advice she shares across multiple platforms to an audience primarily comprising women of color.

In two well-received books that straddle the genres of business memoir and self-help, Smith highlights strategies for corporate advancement to female readers who may feel unsure about how to market their value to their employers.

No Thanks, 7 Ways to Say I’ll Just Include Myself: A Guide to Rockstar Leadership for Women of Color in the Workplace, self-published in 2020, focuses on visibility. Its 2023 follow-up, Yes Please! 7 Ways to Say I’m Entitled to the C-Suite: Secrets Women of Color Need to Know Now to Find Their Happy and Win in an Exclusive Corporate Culture, offers advice on everything from honing ambition and cultivating relationships to bolstering one’s personal profile in the office.

“Early in my career, my Baby Boomer mentors shared with me that it was more important to be respected than to be liked,” she writes in Yes Please! “I found out that respect was good but the premium was on likability.”

Fellow members of Good Street Baptist Church
in Dallas played a key role in shaping L. Michelle
Smith’s outlook on life.

Heart and Soul

Likability seems to come naturally to Smith, the younger daughter of a master teacher and a career civil servant. She grew up in the Oak Cliff area of Dallas as a self-described pew baby. She credits Good Street Baptist Church, less than a mile away from the family home and on the site of a former plantation, with helping to shape her worldview.

“A resounding victory, to build a church right there on that land,” Smith said. “That church represents joy and freedom.”

At age 14, Smith began teaching an adult Sunday school class at Good Street, which she describes as the city’s “original megachurch.” Class members gave her feedback on topics ranging from her outfits to her choice of college. “Most of them wanted me to go to Spelman,” she said, flashing a grin.

The church occupied an outsize role in the life of her family, which includes her older sister, Joyce Price, who followed their mother’s footsteps as an educator. Over the years, Smith has grown to recognize the church’s abiding impact not only on her spiritual life but also on her high-powered career in corporate communication.

In a full-circle moment, the wider church became the subject of her forthcoming book from HarperCollins’ Amistad imprint in partnership with JVL Media. Call & Response: 10 Leadership Lessons From the Black Church is one of three inaugural titles from JVL Media, co-founded by Academy Award-winning actress Viola Davis and her husband, actor Julius Tennon, along with author Lavaille Lavette.

Call & Response arrives in February 2026. The news release announcing the acquisition of Smith’s book touted the title as “a captivating exploration of why many high-ranking, high-performing Black professionals attribute their leadership skills to their origins in the Black Church.”

Building Her Brand

Long before Smith aspired to publish books or host podcasts, she was an undergraduate English major who penned a column for The Skiff and appeared on KTCU Radio. She stayed at TCU for a master’s in media studies. And while Smith promised her parents that she would go into teaching as a fallback, she had other plans.

“Her passion was always helping women of color,” said Kecia Watson Kelly ’93 (DNP ’14), a former roommate of Smith and a sorority sister whose professional experiences in nursing and corporate health care are featured in both No Thanks and Yes Please!

“I feel like she could have been an Oprah,” Kelly said. “Her voice, her inflection, her dedication to her craft in coaching and communication and leading is just incredible. She’s a significant thought leader who has found herself a niche in this world.”

“Even back in school, she was always going full speed, doing 800 things at once,” said Myra Victoria Alsup-Mujtaba ’94, another former roommate. “She’s always been this amazing communicator and is the one who keeps all of us sorority sisters connected.”

Crystal Valteau Morgan ’93, also an Alpha Kappa Alpha sister, credits much of Smith’s success to her “high emotional intelligence” as well as innate leadership abilities.

“She’s always related to people of different backgrounds and been able to connect on a collaborative level,” Morgan said. “Her Skiff columns helped us all come together as a community, especially during Black History Month.”

The summer after her junior year at TCU, Smith interned at WFAA-TV in Dallas, writing copy for the evening news. At that point, Smith had no aspirations for on-air work, “which is ironic,” she said, “because now so much of what I do is on camera.”

After earning a master’s in 1995, she did stints in local TV as a writer and also freelanced for the Arlington Morning News. But Smith felt called to dip a toe in corporate communication in part because she saw the steady and larger income as a source of security.

Amid her career as an executive coach, author and podcast host, L. Michelle Smith gives back to TCU, serving as an adjunct faculty member in the Bob Schieffer College of Communication.

By her 30th birthday, she was vice president of media relations at Ketchum Public Relations, working with clients that included Reliant Energy and Cingular, which was acquired by AT&T. Buoyed by her early successes, Smith launched her own PR firm, M Strategies Inc. As president and CEO, she worked with clients that included Church’s Chicken, Taco Bueno, Pizza Inn and Nielsen.

She ran her own firm for nine years until she was recruited as an executive director/senior vice president at Golin Harris, an industry behemoth named PR Week’s 2024 Agency of the Year.

Then AT&T lured her. She ultimately became the head of diversity corporate communication/inclusion marketing for the Dallas-based telecommunications giant.

Along the way, she had her daughter, Joni. Smith learned to balance single parenthood with the rigors of a high-profile corporate career in which she became a sought-after speaker. She also learned firsthand the pitfalls of outshining those higher on the corporate ladder. She took a buyout from AT&T during a period of corporate restructuring in April 2019. Once again, Smith decided to forge her own path.

“I had so much I still wanted to do,” she said, “and saw this as a real opportunity to help other women because of all that I’d seen and learned.”

Media Maven

Grounded in her faith, family and formative TCU years, Smith emphasizes the importance of staying true to what matters most: “If you align with your core values, everything spins off from that.”

Smith launched a podcast in 2018 called The Culture Soup, which became a consistent Top 10 business show on Apple Podcasts. Many of the 300-plus shows she has produced focus on what she dubs “the double outsider” —Black women endeavoring to ascend the corporate ladder.

Over the airwaves and in print, she talks about middle managers who can halt even the most motivated employee’s forward momentum. Or she’ll expound on mentors who don’t necessarily provide the best advice or even have the best of intentions. She parses the language of toxic work environments and passive-aggressive bosses. She details how the leap from senior manager to director can be the most difficult for any aspiring leader to make.

“Negotiating can seem like yet another battle when you feel like you’re doing battle as a woman of color simply to be seen or heard,” said Smith, who in her role as a certified executive coach works one-on-one with female leaders seeking to grow their skills and opportunities.

Through it all, Smith manages to make time for her alma mater, serving on the Board of Visitors of the Bob Schieffer College of Communication. As an adjunct faculty member, she taught five classes in strategic communication from spring 2020 through fall 2022. She continues to offer her expertise to communication classes, including Dean Kristie Bunton’s upper-level ethics seminar.

“She really emphasized to the students in my spring semester seminar that you’ve got to identify your core values,” said Bunton, who has known Smith since coming to TCU a decade ago. “She didn’t use the phrase ‘moral courage,’ but that was what she was talking to them about. Hearing that is so powerful for a junior or senior in college who is trying to imagine the workplace.”

“If you align with your core values, everything spins off from that,” Smith said. “Wherever you work and whatever you do, that compass will keep you on track.”